


Occam's Razor

by Anonymississippi



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Cat Grant as Press Secretary, F/F, Or as compliant as it can get since I haven't actually watched any of season four :D, Season four compliant, tw blood, tw shooting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-23 22:40:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17089088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: Sometimes, the simplest course of action is the best. Sometimes, your world is filled with aliens, newspaper articles, riots, and the ebb and flow of public opinion.Sometimes, making the harder, more complicated call, is the right call.Cat has to make that call, but it never gets easier.





	Occam's Razor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InRaosLight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InRaosLight/gifts).



> Supergirl Secret Santa Challenge! Really enjoyed getting back into Cat's head again. 
> 
> Prompt: Cat is in danger and Kara has to save her. Only problem? Kara's blown out her powers

Take any general outcome. A little girl with blonde curls blows out a candle on a single cupcake. She wears a paper hat and her cheeks are flushed, because her father has just pushed her high on the park swing, brushing the clouds with the tips of her toes; there’s giggles at the wooden picnic tables as children and mothers mill about. There’s a cluster of balloons, and the child is happy, for a few precious moments.

Take another example. A massive limb blocks traffic on a street after falling to the ground on a windy night. A string of multicolored Christmas lights goes out. A young person stumbles, hands clutching their abdomen because they are bleeding from a wound. Outcomes. Effects.

All brought about by _causes_.

The principle behind Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation for these occurrences is the most likely. It is more likely that the child is celebrating hher birthday with a traditional birthday wish, than it is that she is using her mouth to extinguish spontaneously combusting candles. It is more likely that a branch fell because of bad weather than that a squirrel, fed up with subjugation by the human race, gnawed clean through the splintered bark of the tree to cause utter chaos on the morning commute. It is more likely that there is one faulty bulb in a string of lights than it is that the power got cut in the entire house.

Also, it is more likely that a young person has overexerted, or miscalculated in some way, leading to an injury. It is a thousand times more likely, than, say, that an infallible being was subjected to poison and, upon trying to stop an assassination attempt, stepped in the way of a bullet meant for the press secretary of the United States of America.

Sometimes, the simplest explanation for a dire circumstance is often correct.

Sometimes, the truth is a bit more… complicated.

 

* * *

 

 

“And if I don’t see the CSIS file in two seconds, you’ll be _begging_ Daddy to put in a good word at TED’s marketing department because you’ll be _FIRED_!”

“They’re unpaid interns, Secretary Grant.”

“Which means the tax payers don’t bear the burden of their incompetence,” Cat snipped, tossing yet another file into a banker’s box. “Better to give the best candidate a chance and some pay, meager as a government salary might be, than fuel this office on nepotism and professional ineptitude.”

Eliot, her stalwart head of security, grinned at the remark. Always perched at the door in a non-descript black suit with a curled wire over his left ear, he’d been with Cat from the day she stepped into the White House. He never much talked policy with her, and he’d had concerns about her decision to leave the administration so abruptly, but respected it all the same. He was staying on until the bitter end it seemed, and for that, Cat was grateful.

Cat continued tossing documents into the banker’s box willy-nilly, swilling her remaining Scotch about in her tumbler. It wasn’t quite 5 p.m. yet, but to hell with it. She’d done all she could for Baker and he’d turned around and thrown it right back in her face.

_You’ll find that I do not govern like our previous leader._

_What a shame, Mr. President_ , Cat had said.

Two months later, she gave notice. It was as if the new hires, the new administration, was undoing all of the good work she’d been able to crank out under Olivia. One cabinet member had left voluntarily already, and there were enough murmurs about Baker’s loyalties to stir the pot of pink slips for the more radical additions to Olivia’s staff. Never mind the protests right beyond the White House gates. Never mind the riots in Metropolis, Baltimore, Opal City, Boston, National City, or Dallas. The ship was taking on water fast, and Cat was determined to escape in one of the life-boats before it all went to hell.

Eliot stirred out of the corner of Cat’s periphery. He put a finger to his ear piece, his head downturned to the side.

“For Mrs. Grant?” he asked.

Cat ignored his earpiece chatter, weighing her scotch options for the upcoming evening: Macallan 18 year single malt, or Glenfidditch? With the ensuring shitstorm sure to hit her inbox in the morning, she was gravitating towards whichever one would allow her to drown out her internal clock and sleep past a blistering seven a.m. start-time. It’s not like she’d be delivering the debriefing for one, which both terrified and relieved her.

She’d have a book out within the year, she knew. Once the summer hit, she could do a speaking tour with Carter in tow. Might even consider the Charlie Rose replacement position for CBS _This Morning_ , now that Les Moonves had been summarily sacked. She knew with a certainty she couldn’t go back to the west coast, at least not immediately, not until she had time to prepare herself. She’d built a lot in D.C., as had Carter. Olivia had presented her with an opportunity, and she’d jumped at the chance to start something new. To make some real change.

She was not, as her startlingly intuitive son had suggested, running away from anything.

Or _anyone,_ for that matter.

She’d need to remember the moment, perhaps record herself as she watched, to see if she could crystalize the feeling—when someone else took the podium in the White House press room and addressed the flashes and voices and recorders, relaying the information that Grant had stepped down as press secretary after Baker showed his true colors, after Marsdin was ousted and after the new administration made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that “transparency”, even at the expense of violence against refugees, was paramount for moving America forward.

That’s what she needed to focus on, her own reaction, not other people’s. Not the talking heads, not the editors looking for a chance to discredit her, not the uppity moms of the D.C. STEM Academy where Carter was flourishing.

And certainly not some golden-haired girl half her age on the opposite coast.

“How did she get past the gate?”

“Is there a problem, Eliot?”

“A… visitor for you Mrs. Grant,” Eliot grumped.

“I don’t have anything on my calendar. Unless Stephen is still proving his idiocy even after I fired him.”

“Again, you can’t fire them, Mrs. Grant,” Eliot chided. “She got buzzed through but I wasn’t notified—it seems she brought pastries to the staff downstairs, so they let her through to the west wing offices.”

“…pastries?”

“So it would seem.”

“All it takes to breach the defenses of the most powerful home in the nation is a kronut?”

“To be fair, you weren’t in Metropolis at the height of the kronut craze, Mrs. Grant.”

“Oh, Eliot, I had such faith in you.”

“What people don’t understand is the density of the dough,” Eliot began. “You can’t go too heavy, because you get into biscuit territory. Breakfast baking is not for the weak, there’s _science_ behind the consistency—”

“Eliot, the door.”

“Yes, Mrs. Grant.”

She turns her back and goes back to the box. She needs a moment, hell, she needed _years_ , it seemed, to figure out how to deal with this rather pressing… problem.

“Your latte, Mrs. Grant.”

Kara was dressed in a patterned button-up with olive pants, a cardigan slung over her forearm and her messenger bag hanging off of one shoulder. Her long blonde hair was tucked behind her ears, tied back in her customary low ponytail.

Five syllables— _your latte, Mrs. Grant—_ and she’d been catapulted back in time, to that first morning where Kara had delivered a steaming coffee to her desk when she’d been thirty minutes late, when she’d first come to suspect there was more to _Kiera_ than she’d once supposed.

“So you’re bribing gate guards for the scoop now, is that it?”

“I just used the press pass,” Kara said. “The CATCO Worldwide Media raised a few brows since I’m not with the east coast division. Though Hari is very nice, too.”

“Nice he may be, but he’s got a penchant for passive voice and purple prose that grates,” Cat responded. “He needs to move to one of my leisure publications and let the young upstarts like yourself handle the hard news.”

“It’s hard to sustain the kind of energy the writing requires,” Kara shrugged. “I could understand some pacing issues in hard news, especially nowadays.”

On second glance, Kara looked close to dead on her feet. A slump to the shoulders, no glistening, energetic sparkle behind the glasses, not even that annoyingly cheery pitch at the end of her sentences Cat had come to associate with no one other than Kara. Not quite bags under her eyes, and not quite green around the gills, but something was off.

Cat looked down at Kara’s extended arm.

Well, more than one something.

“This is not a latte,” Cat said, relieving her former assistant of the jar of olives she held out to Cat. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve been working too much if you can’t tell the difference.”

“It’s five o’clock on a Thursday after two protests at the Capital this week. Fox had a field day, and CNN wasn’t much better. Figured you’d be on your second martini by now, or maybe…” Kara peered round Cat, squinting at the desk with the box, the pens scattered about, and the two extra sets of glasses she no doubt tossed down in a flurry of rage, indignation, or simple frustration. “…how far are you into the scotch? I wouldn’t recommend switching liquors.”

“And what does Sunny Danvers know about alcohol intake these days?” Cat tilted her head, placing her hands on her hips. She couldn’t help the grin, seeing Kara again. Even as tired as she looked, it was as if she brought the sunshine of National City along with her. Maybe it was hiding in her satchel. Maybe, just maybe, she’d pull it out only for Cat, beyond the prying eyes of the White House staff, the secret service, the protestors, her interns, her son—all eyes on Cat but Kara always made her feel seen in the most uncomfortable of ways. Ways she couldn’t always control.

And that scared the ever-living shit out of her.

Sunny Danvers to the rescue.

“More than I’d like to know, but I think I get the whole, bourbon-in-the-bottom-drawer after a big story trope, now.”

“So did you fly across the country to for a martini?”

“I had a few other things on the to-do list, but I thought I might could charm you into sharing one with me.”

“With an olive jar.”

“Did it work?”

Cat just smiled. She pivoted on her heel to fetch her purse, and grabbed her coat from where it was hanging over the back of her office chair.

“Eliot, call the car.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Can’t even fight him in the press,” Kara finished. “I’ve got my eyes on the monitors all day, I’ve seen you struggling with them as well. It’s… I’ve never tried to shift an entire nation’s view point before. The riots are getting more violent, more and more aliens are attacked daily… I don’t know what to do, Cat.”

Cat had heard rumblings of the Liberty group on the west coast, but it was the same across the globe. The one thing that might band the human race together was hating outside races even more. Perhaps it was too much to ask imperfect creatures like humans to band together in love, kindness, hope.

Even Supergirl seemed to be flagging these days.

“I… don’t feel like I’ve got the best advice for you at the moment,” Cat said, staring down at her drink.

The bar was dimly lit, upscale, and quieter than she would’ve liked. But they were tucked in a corner booth with Eliot on guard two tables down, so it wasn’t that Cat felt unsafe. She'd had plenty of threats against her, but nothing credible. However, the threats had increased in frequency as of late, growing in scale along with the riots. She would never leave a job she believed because of a threat, but there was no use in sticking her neck out over an administration who had abandoned the ideals she'd initially found such commonality with. Threats aside, she also had to keep a look out for the press.

There were eyes and ears all over D.C., and even off the record, being spotted speaking with a reporter from one of her former publications might not sit well with the media elite.

Cat took another swallow of scotch, wondering why she cared. She was resigning tomorrow, and the drudgery of replacing her would commence first thing Monday. She could talk to whoever the hell she wanted to talk to.

Emboldened by her tenuous position in the Baker’s administration, Cat slid closer to Kara. They’d shared close space before, Kara’s energy magnetic, Cat’s gravity powerful. Years later, and they continued to seek one another out. The emails exchanged in her time away contained little glimpses into Kara’s personal life, but Cat wondered if the poor girl was coming up on that stage where work—both her reporting and more heroic extracurriculars—were impeding her social life, her family life, her romantic life.

Best not to get into that if she wanted to leave the evening with a shred of self-respect.

“I’m stepping down tomorrow,” Cat said.

Kara put her drink down, staring. “Really?”

“Can’t do it anymore. I signed on to work for Olivia. And Baker… I tried to give him a chance, but the way things are going…”

“Huh,” Kara managed, her half grin utterly charming.

“What’s that?”

“Never imagined I’d be in the same boat as you. I always thought I’d be in some little dingy, and you’re up there, all high and mighty on a yacht. You just… always seem to know what to do.”

“Well, I’ll certainly figure it out. But for now—”

“Another scotch?”

“Another scotch,” Cat agreed, smiling as Kara slid closer, tilted her glass, and clinked it against Cat’s own. “Why did I ever promote you?” Cat teased.

“Something about me being way too good at my job,” Kara responded.

“And so humble, too.”

 

* * *

 

 

Too fast.

The evening was over way too fast.

And what came after their respite in a booth, with addled heads and the warmth of familiarity…

It all happened too damn _fast_.

Kara was opening the restaurant door for her, and Eliot was at the door of the black Suburban. It couldn’t have been twelve feet of space between the exit and the car. But three figures in black, nondescript heights, faces covered, rounded the corner so quickly Cat didn’t see them until she took her seat in an investigator’s office four days later, when they played back the security footage from the lawyer’s office two building’s down. She remembers an unfamiliar voice— _Cat Grant, that’s her!_ —Eliot rushing past and Kara wrapping her up so quickly in her arms, it almost felt like she’d been in her arms before.

She recalled soaring through the air, toes touching the clouds like her five-year-old self dreamed of doing. She always swung so high, knowing her father would always be there to guide her back to earth.

Her father died two years later, just shy of her seventh birthday.

There were five loud pops, four massive thuds, three bodies whirling around Eliot, two broken windows, and one bleeding girl. It was like a twisted, terrible Christmas carol in the dark December night.

“C-C-Cat—”

“Kara!”

“C-Cat I—I’m sorry—”

“Kara, no, I—oh God, please—"

Sirens were screeching streets away. Someone was hollering on the ground at Eliot’s feet as his chest rose and fell in heaving breaths, as the pattern of panting and rapid footfalls abandoned the scene. Warm, wet blood gushed from Kara’s back as she squirmed in agony on top of Cat.

“Can’t—can’t feel my legs—” Kara gasped.

Her glasses were gone, and tears poured down her face and onto Cat’s cheek.

“I—I—“

Just like Kuwait. With Lois scavenging through the rubble behind the first line and Cat in the back of the Humvee with Derek and his head wound. She’d almost called the medic then, which would have been the simplest means of getting out of there.

Simplest, but not the best.

Cat wondered how long she had before the sirens reached them.

“Kara, Kara darling, listen—”

“—it _hurts_ Cat—”

“Your phone,” Cat managed, scrambling out from under Kara, who lay prone on the sidewalk. “Kara, where’s your phone?!”

“B-Bag, left p-p-pocket!” Kara sucked in a huge breath, gasping in agony.

Cat sifted through pens and notepads and a tablet, a black device and a cape as red as her hand.

“Eliot! Eliot, are you—”

“Caught me in my shoulder, Mrs. Grant,” Eliot answered. He was currently sitting on one of the attackers while her driver hollered their location over the phone to emergency personnel. “Your assistant, is she—”

“I don’t know, but we need to stall the ambulance.”

“Stall?”

“Got it!” Cat said, clutching Kara’s yellow phone case. “Kara, I’m sorry, I’m sorry okay?” Cat painfully maneuvered Kara’s right arm out from underneath her, ignoring the younger woman’s cries. “I’m calling your sister—”

As she said this, Cat wiped Kara’s scraped thumb as she cried, putting pressure on the wound in her back and scrolling immediately to her Recents.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up, _pick up_ —!”

“Kara?”

“Alex! Cat Grant,” Cat managed, breathing through the hot smell of iron flooding her nostrils. “Kara’s been shot.”

“Kara’s been… wait, what do you—”

“Kara’s been shot, she’s bleeding out on the sidewalk, and I know you’ve got an east coast DEO contact that can be here in _seconds_ unless you want an EMT fresh outta community college to tell the world Supergirl’s been paralyzed.”

“Give me five minutes, and don’t turn her phone off. We’ll ping your location to east coast division.”

“Make it two!” Cat snapped, throwing the phone aside to lie down with Kara, her hand pressing with all of her might against the seeping blood.

“Your sister’s coming,” Cat said, wiping at Kara’s tears with her cleaner hand. Her bones felt frozen despite the liquor and the blood. Kara’s eyes were large and glazed, her focus going in and out. “Kara, Kara, come on…” Cat slapped gently at her face, fighting back her own tears. “What the hell happened to you, Supergirl?” Cat murmured, removing her coat to press it against Kara’s back.

“KIERA!” she shouted, and Kara jolted back to consciousness, her eyes ping-ponging into recognition.

“Talk to me, now. If you go quiet, you’ll go into shock.”

“Can’t…” Kara started, attempting to press up with one of her arms. “C-c-c-can’t mmmmove.”

“Then stay still and _talk_ to me,” Cat said again.

“Who—who was—?”

“No idea, but I can’t wait to kill them,” Cat said. “Why are you bleeding, Kara?”

“I g-g-got shot!”

“You’re more used to catching bullets than bleeding from them,” Cat seethed. “What the hell were you doing traveling powerless? You think there aren’t a million people capable of reading some paper for a figurehead. I am _nothing_ , Kara, compared to you. We can’t lose Supergirl right now, and I sure as hell can’t lose Kara Danvers.”

“’m sorry.”

“You’re gonna be.”

“Alex… coming?”

“Yes. She’s sending someone first. Probably has a military grade jet that can get her here in 45 minutes.”

“Cat? It’s… it’s c-cold.”

“It twenty fucking degrees out, of course it’s cold.”

“You’re n-n-not wearing—coat.”

“I know,” Cat managed, gulping down the rock in her throat. Kara had lost a lot of blood, but she wasn’t getting colder from the weather. Her face was so pale she looked blue around her lips.

“Tell—tell Alex… my papers are in the second-–kitch-kitchen drawer—"

“Kara, listen, someone is coming to get you, okay? You’re going to be okay.”

“I know when you’re lying, Cat,” Kara smiled, and the red lines of blood running in the spaces between her teeth reminded Cat of those grotesque bodies of soldiers. It had almost been twenty-five years since her stint in the Middle East, but she couldn’t easily forget that trip. Not with Lois. Not with the casualties. Not when they looked exactly like Kara looked now.

“I doubt that,” Cat whispered, because she’d been lying to herself, to Kara, to _everyone_ , for years now, claiming she didn’t feel as if her whole world were zooming high above her in the airstreams, clad in blues and reds and sporting an _S_ for the strength Cat so desperately needed at the moment.

The next ten minutes passed in a blur. The ambulance arrived first, and Cat had one hell of a time talking the EMT’s out of taking the stretcher as they moved Kara off of the sidewalk. By the grace of some higher power, a swarm of black SUVs arrived on the heels of the flashing blue lights, with a small, familiar figure leading the charge.

Lucy Lane.

She stepped right in between Cat and the EMTs, flashed a badge that made them back away and had Kara loaded into a van and zooming off to a second location before the other technicians had even started cutting the sleeve of Eliot’s shirt away.

Lane tromped around, issuing order after order, directing a clean-up team to scrub the blood from the sidewalk and to canvas the area for witnesses and security footage. Kara was gone, so Cat immediately rushed to check on Eliot, keeping Lucy in her sights. At some point, the cops showed up, late, late, much too late, but Lucy handled them as well.

“I’m fine, mam’,” Eliot insisted, grimacing as the suture pulled tight against his shoulder. “I’m just sorry I didn’t see them quicker.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cat insisted. “Because of you, we apprehended one of them.”

“Should’ve gotten all three.”

“Three on one is hardly fair.”

“How’s your girl?” Eliot asked.

Cat wished she knew. “She’ll be fine,” Cat insisted, nodding as the tears prickled at her eyes.

“Lucy!” Cat called, after squeezing Eliot gently against his good arm.

“Cat!” Lucy said, brushing back a stray lock of hair out of  hair that had come loose from her tight, military-grade bun.

“Where’s she going? Do you have the medical—”

“Unit outside of Arlington, and yes, she’d actually just left us when she came to see you.”

“She’s powerless,” Cat managed. “She was _bleeding_.”

“I know, but we’re on it. Thank god she was here instead of Metropolis, their medical units only have two sunbeds.”

“What does that mean?”

“Come with us,” Luch said, thumbing back toward the SUV. “We’ll need to take your statement any way, figure out something to release to the press and the White House. Once she’s stable, you can go sit with her.”

“She’ll… she’ll make it?”

“We’re really good at what we do,” Lucy comforted her, throwing a blanket over her small shoulders. She hadn’t realized until that instance that she’d been shivering. “And Alex is on her way. She’ll touch down at base by… 2130.”

Cat nodded, unable to formulate too many more questions. She scampered into the back of the black SUV and blocked out Lucy’s chatter with the driver. She was too concerned with the blood on her hands, the injury of her security officer, and the bullet in her assistant’s back.

Later, when she sat at Kara's bedside, clutching her hand, feeling the heat from the sun lamps permeate her skin, she'd feel less sick to her stomach. Later, after she vomited in Lucy's wastebasket, after seeing the bloodied sheets from where they'd transferred Kara to an operating table, she'd feel more like she hadn't wasted her last chance at telling the girl how she felt. Later, after she'd kissed Kara's forehead and stepped aside for her sister to come in, she'd consider the gravity of fallible gods, and how even those mere humans think beyond reproach, still struggle with weakness.

Later, Cat would make the decision to return to National City and fight the Children of Liberty, to aid Supergirl in her quest, and to keep a close, watchful eye on Kara Danvers. Later, she would watch Kara wiggle her toes, bend her knees, and stand tall and strong. Later, she too would stand, dirty, bloody, and tired, and wrap her hero up in a long, necessary hug, just to be in her arms one more time.

Sometimes, the simplest solution is the right one.

Most times, at least where Cat was concerned, the right decision was rarely ever simple.

 


End file.
